Last week, we heard Samsung announce that it was planning to reveal a new version of its Exynos 5 Octa SoC. So far, we’ve seen what the original Octa can do in the Galaxy S 4, and were curious to learn what improvements might push Samsung to come out with a new revision this early in the chip’s short life. Well, today the manufacturer has gone ahead and made this new SoC official, announcing the Exynos 5 Octa 5420.

For those of you keeping track, the Exynos 5 Octa from the GS4 is the 5410. So, what’s the difference between these chips – what makes the 5420 better?

The most obvious change is Samsung’s replacing the PowerVR GPU in the 5410 with a Mali T628 MP6. That actually makes a good deal of sense, as Samsung had grown comfortable with Mali GPUs with its Exynos 4 chips. The new GPU supports GPGPU number-crunching, has more processing power than the PowerVR, and is optimized for use with high-resolution displays.

The main CPU cores sound pretty much the same, but Samsung claims that power-saving optimizations could boost performance up to 20% over the previous chip – we’ll believe it when we see it. There’s also increased memory bandwidth, and improved hardware support for video acceleration.

Samsung doesn’t mention what device we’ll first see employ the 5420, but we’ve got our eyes on the Galaxy Note III.